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Freedom to Learn

The war against childhood continues. Children are no longer generally free to roam, play, and explore on their own, as they were in the past and are designed by nature to do. Parents who allow such play are being arrested. Schools throughout the country have eliminated or greatly curtailed recesses. The last bastion in the battle to preserve childhood appears to be be....

In the absence of an appropriate intellectual foundation and motivation to learn, students acquire academic skills by rote, in shallow, meaningless ways. This not only wastes students' time, but can cause serious harm to their future intellectual and academic development. Here's some of the evidence.

Many preschool and kindergarten teachers are extremely upset by the increased pressure to teach literary and numerical skills to little children and test them regularly. They can see firsthand the unhappiness generated, and they suspect that the children would be learning much more useful lessons by playing. Their suspicions are well validated by research studies.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv have been giving their children some of the same freedom that they themselves enjoyed as children, in a world that is safer than the one in which they grew up. As a consequence, they have been visited by police, and the county Child Protective Services have threatened to take their children away. Here is my interview with Danielle.

Adam Eichenbaum, Daphne Bavelier, and C. Shawn Green have, in a recent review article, summarized a growing mountain of evidence for long-lasting positive effects of video-game play on basic mental processes--such as perception, attention, memory, and decision-making--regarded by some as the building blocks of intelligence.

The Bedley brothers (Tim and Scott), who are both teachers in California, have started a movement, and it seems to be taking off. They have declared Feb. 4, 2015, to be the first annual Global School Play Day. Let's do everything we can to support it!

On January 1, 2015, John Moravec, a philosopher of education and world traveler, sent out a manifesto about the future of education. It has caught on and spread far more rapidly than he could have imagined it might. Within days, it was read by people in 84 countries and translated into seven languages (with more translations on the way). Read it here and send it on!

Lack of respect for children is revealed in the language used by the Nobel Committee in their award of this year's Peace Prize. It's also revealed in the United Nation's Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

Parent-child play is ruined when either the parent or the child dominates. Fun occurs when there is no domination in either direction. Parent-child play is not as natural, nor as crucial for the child's development, as child-child play, but it can still be fun.

The joy of school letting out is not just superficial and fleeting. Data from one children's mental health center indicate that children are far more likely to experience psychological breakdowns during the school year than during the summer. School is bad for children's mental health as well as their physical health.

Most of the grown unschoolers in our survey were very happy with their unschooling and said they would unschool their own children. A few, however, were unhappy, and their descriptions of their childhoods make it clear why they would be. This final report in the series describes the advantages and disadvantages of unschooling, in the respondents’ own words.

Our survey of grown unchoolers—who had skipped all or much of K-12—revealed, not surprisingly, that many went on to careers in the creative arts. But that is not all. Many also pursued STEM careers and many become entrepreneurs. They chose careers that are enjoyable, meaningful, and high in occupational self-direction.

Most people in our culture believe that college admission requires 13 years of hard work in school, maybe accompanied by frequent tears. To some of them it may be disturbing to learn that it is possible to go to college, and do well there, with no K-12 schooling at all, just by following your own interests and dreams. Here are the words of some who did just that.

How do people who didn't go to school or do curriculum-based homeschooling as children and teenagers fare in adult life? Can they go to college and do well there without previous schooling? What kinds of careers do they pursue? In retrospect, are they happy or unhappy with their unschooled background? In this study, 75 grown unschoolers tell us about their experiences.

I was invited recently to speak at a worldwide conference on play and learning, sponsored by the Lego Foundation. Not surprisingly, I was pleased by some aspects of the conference, displeased by other aspects. Here's why, and here are my thoughts about how the Lego Foundation might make a real, vitally needed difference in the lives of children and families.

Children love to play with great heights, rapid speeds, dangerous tools, dangerous elements (e.g. fire), chasing and fighting, and getting lost (or nearly so). Why has the drive for such play evolved? What happens when children are deprived of such play? How dangerous, really, is such play? How does the danger compare with the danger of adult-directed sports?

We are born to be playful. We are, as Johan Huizinga put it long ago, Homo Ludens (the playful human) even more than we are Homo Sapiens (the wise human). But many of lose our playfulness. Why do we lose it, and how can we recover it? Here’s why, and here, especially, is how to recover it—from a new book by Bernard DeKoven.

Many adults are puzzled, and some are appalled, by the amount of time teens spend online and by what they seem to do there. In her new book,"It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens," Danah Boyd helps us make sense of teens' uses of social media. Her data and analyses debunk some common myths about teens, technology, and social media....

Clinical assessment questionnaires indicate that narcissism has been rising and empathy has been declining in young people over the past 30 years or more. Why? Here are several reasonable explanations.

The "Reading Wars," the battles between those who favor phonics and those who favor whole-word or whole-language instruction of reading, have been declared to be over. The data clearly favor the early and explicit teaching of phonics. But when children learn to read out of school, on their own initiative, they do so with little attention to phonics. Why this difference?

One of the questions I'm often asked by professors who teach from my introductory psychology textbook is this: "Why don't you include Zimbardo's classic Stanford Prison Experiment in your book, like all other introductory psychology textbook authors do?" Here's why.

High pressure testing and evaluation inhibits learning and drives a wedge between those who already know and those who don't. That is one explanation of the education gap between children from economically well off families and those from poorer families, and why that gap has been increasing over the past few decades.

The struggle for educational freedom in Europe is a human rights struggle, on a par with other such struggles throughout the ages. Parents in the Netherlands have been fined, threatened with imprisonment, and threatened with having their children removed, for following their conscience in education. These are loving, caring, intelligent, responsible--and brave--parents.

In hunter-gatherer cultures, such as that of the Efe, infants and children develop close relationships with, and are cared for by, the entire band, not just parents. Today, too, both children and parents need the support of a caring community. The nuclear family is not enough.

When everyone knows several families who have left coercive schooling and chosen a path of educational self-determination, so it no longer seems like an odd thing to do, we will reach a tipping point. The floodgates will open, and coercive schools will empty out. You can help our nation and world reach that tipping point.

Education professor Yong Zhao suggests that the American school system is like a sausage machine that isn’t very good at producing sausages, and that’s why it’s better than the Chinese school system, which is very good at producing sausages.

About Freedom to Learn

Children come into the world with instinctive drives to educate themselves. These include the drives to play and explore. This blog is primarily about these drives and ways by which we could create learning environments that optimize rather than suppress them.